


Crushing Closeness

by Snailcomicz



Category: Star Wars Legends: Knights of the Old Republic (Video Games)
Genre: Angst with a Happy Ending, Force Bond (Star Wars), Gen, Hurt/Comfort, It was SUPPOSED to just be clean up duty with the stranglers but..., No characters are killed in this fic, Timeline: after non-existent third game and winning in war against Sith, Whump
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-10-25
Updated: 2019-10-25
Packaged: 2020-12-20 23:50:07
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,956
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/21065240
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Snailcomicz/pseuds/Snailcomicz
Summary: The party sure does have to spend some time fighting the hidden Sith outposts after the final war against evil with Revan… It sure would be a shame if something were to… Happen…





	Crushing Closeness

**Author's Note:**

> @Owlady (owldart on Tumblr) sent me the prompt “I can’t live without you” for the pair that refused to admit the fact that they liked each other out loud unless they were on the timeline where one of them was dying.  
The fact I wrote like five pages of hardcore whump is her fault, not mine.

“GLADIOLUS!”

“Rand, don’t go back there-”

He tore through the Sith apprentices, kindness be damned, hostages be damned, even watching his own back be damned, several tons of rock and dirt had just collapsed on the only person here that was _worth _a damn-

“RAND!”

Because they had trusted her to hold the rockslide off, to have their backs, when the only reason he was here, the only reason Kreia had kept him around, the only reason he came on this specific mission was to watch _hers_-

"ATTON!”

“SHE’S ALIVE!”

“WILL SHE FIGHT OFF THESE SHUTTAS WHEN WE FIND HER?!?”

The fact she didn’t say ‘if’ was the only thing that made him turn around, snarling into the gas mask and hurling a poison grenade at his feet. The Sith apprentices impulse to flee or cover their mouths left gaps in their guard, places he and Revan took savage advantage of in their mutual desperation. Revan was all brute force, brute Force and raw muscle, shattering one of the Sith’s lightsabers through the power of her strike alone. Atton had to fight smarter, using the apprentices uncoordinated moves against each other and hurling a handy grenade when the best opportunity struck. Their mutually destructive tactics were usually tempered by the more practical strategies of the Exile.

She wasn’t tempering either of them now.

The battlefield was quiet for barely a breath before both of them whirled back around. Some distant, emotional, _soft _part of him had expected her to have blasted a hole in the rubble and already started treating her injuries with a medpack, ready to remind them both to take the edge off of their fighting strategies. Instead they found a wall of rock, with dirt still drifting down from it’s landing, and utter silence.

“Atton-”

“She can cut herself off from the Force.” He started towards the cave in, trying to figure out how to even approach this.

“Don’t touch it Ran-”

“Do I _look _like I’m touching it?” Explosions would be useless, too uncontrolled, it could crush her. He should have felt something by now, she should have opened back up to the Force by now. They couldn’t start at the top and burrow down, she would be at the bottom of the silt and it would take too long. He whirled back around. “Do something useful and help me! Help her!”

“Trying, Rand.” Revan stood stock still, hand barely raised, staring at the wall with that distant ‘solving a puzzle but only in my mind’ look. Her greying hair lifted away from her face slightly, and all the dirt that had started to settle started unnaturally floating back into the air. Her voice was low and tight as a crossbow string when she said, “I don’t have her precision, you’re going to have to go in and pull her out yourself.”

Then, the rocks started to shift. Barely by an inch near the top of the rock slide, and even when Revan’s powers got to the bottom of the rubble there was only a small gap, but some part of Gladiolus would have still been on the ground when the whole thing came down and it was the best shot they had. Getting to his knees and dragging himself forward with his arms, he breathed through the filter of his mask and tried to push his senses outward. It was too dark to see, even with the dim lights still on on their side of the cave in, and pushing against the rocks might break Revan’s concentration so he had to calm down and use his other ‘sense’. He squeezed his eyes shut and swallowed hard, thinking of how boring meditating was usually and who would guide him through it.

-It’s basically an extension of your gut instinct, Atton. I’m teaching you how to focus power you already have, just in ways you haven’t thought about using it.-

He pushed his senses outward, using the Force as his gut instinct, the way she had phrased it so long ago. It was a crutch he hadn’t needed in some time, but a useful one. Danger was everywhere, pulling his at his nerves and making him grit his teeth, but where was it worse? What place scared him most? He shifted left and pulled himself forward a good few feet, not daring to open his eyes and lose his train of thought, when something streaked gritty liquid across the edge of his cheek.

“Gotcha.” He barely breathed, feeling none of the confidence his tone tried to convey. Quick exploration with his hands found her hand coming off the low ceiling, and after that finding the rest of her was easy. Revan had, by accident or on purpose, pulled Gladiolus to the temporary ceiling with the rest of the rockslide. Finally finding her belt, he also found more gritty liquid and realized it wasn’t water.

“Come on Exile, I got you.” Tracing upwards until he found a catch in her chestplate he pulled her down slowly, waiting until her feet dragged on the ground to start pulling her in and shuffling backwards. Gravity seemed to come back to her slowly, like Revan was still trying to pull her up, but he was just strong enough to manhandle her out of the rubble before he saw the extent of the damage.

“No.”

“Rand, get back.” Revan’s horse whisper barely registered as he stared in horror. Gladiolus wasn’t just bleeding, she was bleeding heavily from multiple places.

“Rand,” Headwounds always looked bad, but the shoulder that bore the hand he brushed against looked ripped open, and her side was bleeding too. He tried to pull healing energy from the Force, silently begging it wouldn’t fail just this once, and nothing happened.

“_Atton. Move. Back._” Revan hissed, ignoring the Exile’s condition, ignoring her healing duties because her healing spells _worked_, ignoring-

Revan was sweating, he could see that from several feet away, with her hand fully extended and shaking all over with effort. Even her breaths were clipped, and the darkened lines that appeared when she tried to push past her limits or use the Force too much-

Oh.

Only taking the time to be gentle with her shoulder he hoisted the Exile up and started forward. Moments later the entire rockslide slammed back into the ground. Revan choked, stumbling and falling backwards, but he didn’t have any time left to spare for her. Laying Gladiolus back on the ground he pulled out one of the Life Support packs and jammed it into her thigh, waiting until he heard the distinctive shift in air pressure and beep from medicine being released before opening its outer case and gathering gauze for her shoulder.

Revan had crawled close enough to see out of his periphery, dark lines still coating her cheeks and pulling at her creaselines, but as soon as she was in range she held up her hand in the healing shape and tried to draw light to Gladiolus’s shoulder.

“Take a breather.”

“I’m not losing her either Atton! Y-”

“I know how healing works, even if I can’t _do _it, Revan.” He snapped. “Just stop and recover so you can actually heal.”

Revan bared her teeth at him before quickly crossing her legs and rifling through her bag, tearing open something sealed and biting into it. Her face faltered when her eyes fell back on her friend though, and she shifted closer to put pressure on Gladiolus’ shoulder with her empty hand. “She’s, she isn’t reconnecting to the Forc-”

“She will.” Another Life Support pack, click beep gauze, _wind it around the gauze already on her shoulder, _he thought,_ the next one goes to the side wound, then head, then what’s bleeding worse,_ he thought, _they should have brought more people,_ he thought. He _knew _he couldn’t lose her.

Revan’s healing light flared up around Gladiolus’ head, and he shifted back to put pressure on her side. “Is she breathi-”

“She _will_.” He didn’t dare check, not her breath or her pulse, pressing firmly on the wound in her side. Because he was a coward, a deserter, selfish beyond belief, and if she was gone not only was the rest of the universe done for, but he wouldn’t have anything _left_. He used up all his hope in the Mandelorian Wars, his loyalty on the figurehead the woman beside him used to be during the Jedi-Sith Wars, his luck on Pazzak, and his sheer doggedness on keeping the last person he expected to love alive. Without her support, his slowly growing empathy and healing would collapse in on itself. In her solid, unshakeable light he had changed too much from the shell of the man he used to be to go back, but not enough to hold on to any of the good he’d scraped up in himself without her.

“Please, ‘Lus.” He whispered. “I can’t do this- I can’t _live _without you.”

The _one_ person, the only one of the _three _of them that didn’t deserve any of this, he should have gotten over himself and made sure she was breathing _seven, twelve, twenty one_ seconds ago, _damn _it-

Revan slapped him on the shoulder with unregulated strength, almost bowling him over. “It’s your stupid card game!”

He thought _four_ barely a second. “What?”

“Listen.”

He glared at her wordlessly, double checking the Exile before glancing over his shoulder-

“No, idiot.” She flicked his head with one hand, before pointing at his chest and trying to pry into his mental wall, oddly grinning when he automatically started counting cards to rebuff her. “_That _kind of listen.”

Tension prickled up and down his back from her intended intrusion and distrust surged back into the forefront of his mind, leaving up his mental walls and checking his tally, putting down a plus _four_-

He held his breath and reached out once more. He kept counting his cards, hoping that she would respond with her own play, that Revan was saying what he thought she was saying, he hadn’t imagined-_Fourteen_

Reaching out for Gladiolus in the Force most of the time was like trying to find a massive searchlight in the middle of the day, where other light and connections were everywhere, but it was always _blindingly_ obvious where she was. During the rare times she cut herself off from the Force, reaching out for her was like looking for a specific light that wasn’t turning on a navigational console, scrambling for something that should be there but wasn’t even if you knew it would turn back on eventually.

In this moment, when he faintly felt her for the first time, it was like trying to find a shorting flashlight beam in a fully illuminated room.

But she was _there_, barely flashing out numbers without any of the addition or colors the two of them normally conveyed when they had to play this mental game. Wetness gathered along the edges of his eyes when he felt the barest hint of satisfaction at _twenty _and realized she really was going to be alright.

Revan switched which hand was putting pressure on Gladiolus’ shoulder and held her other hand out, healing light surging back stronger than before and finally stemming the bleeding on her forehead. “I can’t believe you. Minutes after getting _crushed_, you regain consciousness and you’re inspiring us instead of healing yourself?!?”

The almost hysterical note in Revan’s voice matched the deep seated twist in his gut, with them both feeling that sickening terror of _too close, too close_ hanging in the air. But even when Gladiolus’ lost consciousness again and her numbers faded back out, her light didn’t, barely there but _there _where he could reach her.


End file.
